Aerial vehicle can include manned airplanes, rotary type unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) including helicopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, octocopters or the like, and/or fixed wing UAVs can be used to obtain aerial photographs. While capturing the images, the aerial vehicle may tilt from side to side (roll angle) or from front to back (pitch angle). The time to stitch, for example, to assemble, a plurality of images together to form a single aerial photograph or mosaic image can be several hours, depending on the number of images and the computing power available. Commercial or general aviation aircraft typically use highly accurate gyroscope based attitude sensors, but these can be too heavy and costly for small unmanned aerial vehicles.
Aerial imaging using small UAVs can generate images captured when the aerial vehicle was flying with large pitch and/or roll angles. However, these images can be time consuming to stitch into a mosaic image because of the large number of angles that must be used to generate test images to create the best mosaic result.
To speed up the stitching process, some stitching software will not tolerate large pitch and roll angles commonly encountered by small aerial vehicles, requiring the use of camera gimbal mounts, which can be heavy, relatively expensive, and can cause reliability issues.